Steve Jobs warns against dogma

Early in the 1980's I got my first Apple computer, a II Plus. I remember taking it into work (Oregon's state health planning agency) and wowing my fellow employees with how VisiCalc could automate a spreadsheet, showing results on a small green screen.

Since, I've owned and enjoyed many other Apple products. So I felt sad, along with countless other people, when I heard that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had died.

Watching tributes to him on TV, I was exposed to Jobs' philosophy of life. Until now I hadn't realized how appealing his outlook on life and death was. I knew that he had struggled with pancreatic cancer and obviously was a technological visionary, yet didn't know much about Jobs otherwise.

Here are some passages from his 2005 Commencement Address at Stanford University. I've picked out sections of his talk that appealed to my churchless side. (Those who would rather listen to Jobs, than read him, can see the fifteen minute address on You Tube.)

Jobs briefly attended classes at Portland's Reed College, a free-thinking liberal arts college an hour north of my Salem home. He took a calligraphy class which seemed impractical to him at the time. Later, Jobs used what he learned in designing the first Macintosh computer, observing:

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Jobs was fired from Apple, the firm he started, when the Board of Directors lost faith in his vision for the company, preferring another guy's ideas. These thoughts reminded me of how leaving a religion can be freeing in a similar way.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

A year previous, Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In 2005 it appeared that the cancer was curable. Still, death was on his mind, as it had been for many years before.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Here's some great advice:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

"Stay foolish." I can do that. No problem.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

And thank you, Steve. Before you died, you changed the world in many positive ways. Today, you still are.

Comments

[cc]

Despite the fact that today is the first day of the rest of a life that could end tomorrow, we're more inclined to bet on tomorrow than on ending.

So if you can talk others into betting on death, you can sell anything to anyone.

[Roger]

Let's say today is the last day of a person's life. OK, let's just say that. Death to that person actually comes tonight at midnight. So, should that person spend their remaining hours being...Hungry and Foolish? I'm not finding fault with: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. That sounds pretty good. I'm just curious what any of us would really do in those remaining known hours.

[cc]

A friend of mine who lived Saudi Arabia told me about a man who was about to be beheaded when his accuser pled for his life and stayed the executioner's hand. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital from the distress of being on the chopping block.